Why Does Jeff Bezos’ Two-Pizza-Team Rule Still Apply in 2018?

Jeff Bezos is a prolific author and businessman. Over the years, he has offered hundreds of morsels of wisdom to his investors in 21 letters, ranging from prioritizing long-term goals over short-term performance to embedding R&D in every department.

He also has a distinct perspective on corporate communication.

Individual teams, according to Bezos, should not be more than two pizzas can feed, regardless of how big your company grows.

Consider this: it’s difficult to connect with individuals at a crowded party. You’re daunted by the sheer number of people you’ll have the opportunity to meet and interact with. As a result, you have more — but shallower — encounters. If the host is trying to communicate with the audience, he or she may have difficulty shouting over the din the.In contrast, at a small gathering, you might spend hours conversing with the people seated next to you. You’ll be able to form more significant connections and even come away with new ideas and inspiration.

Despite the fact that Bezos first established the “two-pizza” rule in Amazon’s early days, it still resonates today. As the speed of venture finance quickens and more firms enter hypergrowth, determining how and when to construct teams for effective communication becomes increasingly important.

As teams grow, communication becomes a nightmare.

The problem with rapidly expanding teams isn’t the size of the group. J. Richard Hackman, an organizational psychologist and expert on team dynamics, points out that it’s the quantity of connections between people that becomes an issue. Examine the formula for calculating the number of connections between members of a group.

The expense of coordinating, communicating, and relating to one another escalates to the point where individual and team productivity suffers. “The larger a group, the more process challenges members face in carrying out their collective work,” Hackman noted. Worse, a group’s vulnerability to such problems rises rapidly as its size grows.”

You want to make sure your team can stay dispersed and move quickly. As businesses grow, breaking them down into smaller pods enables more liberty and creativity.

It’s critical to find tools to assist you in managing your teams. Find a local computer repair expert to assist you in locating and configuring a platform that will meet your needs.

The Team Scaling Fallacy is protected by two-pizza teams.

Many managers and leaders fall into the mental trap of believing that expanding a team is always a positive thing, especially during times of growth. People are your most valuable assets, so adding more to a project should speed things up, right?

The truth is that having a larger staff makes people overconfident. According to researchers Bradley Staats, Katherine Milkman, and Craig Fox, people have a tendency to “underestimate job completion time as team size expands.” In one of their trials, they discovered that two-person teams took 36 minutes to complete the same Lego figure whereas four-person teams took 52 minutes — a difference of nearly 44 percent. The larger teams, on the other hand, were roughly twice as optimistic about how long it would take.

When a project is behind schedule, you need to get something done quickly, or a big milestone is on the line, it seems sensible to hire more personnel.Sticking to a two-pizza team limit will counteract a natural temptation to undervalue the expenses and annoyance of dealing with those extra links.

The Risks of a Large Executive Team

The C-Suite is not exempt from the two-pizza rule. Without the proper checks and balances, this group can quickly become a burden. According to Harvard Business School data, the number of people in the C-Suite has doubled since the 1970s. Companies have been scurrying to establish and fill new posts like Chief Technology Officer, Chief Information Officer, Chief Sustainability Officer, and Chief Supply Chain Officer in order to keep up. In many circumstances, this results in top-heavy organizations.

Making decisions in this situation can be difficult. With so many stakeholders, each with various levels of power, finding a consensus can take much longer than it would if there were only two or three voices.While having a diverse range of perspectives and backgrounds is beneficial, there are ways to structure leadership such that the most critical debates are focused and efficient.

To keep the C-Suite to a two-pizza team, follow these steps:

Examine your peers’ success rates for new C-Suite positions. Is it worthwhile to hire a Chief Sustainability Officer or a Chief Digital Officer? Could this be a corporate endeavor rather than a paid position?

Substitute “sub-committees” for full executive positions. Take their opinions into consideration, but don’t put them on the same level as your senior executives.

External consultants can assist you in determining which executive jobs are critical to your company’s mission — and which you can do without.

1. What is the enchanted number?

The two-pizza limit, according to Bezos, allows for a maximum of six or seven non-ravenous people. Hackman, a teamwork expert, says five is his magic number, and he strongly advises against exceeding ten. The US Navy Seals, according to management expert Bob Sutton, have discovered that “four is the best size for a combat unit.” Amplitude, a product analytics business, argues that a growth team for a growing startup should consist of 5–10 devoted members.

It’s safe to assume that a small team’s size stays in the single digits, so once you’ve surpassed ten people, start thinking about breaking into subgroups.

2. Adhere to the Cheers rule of successful teams.

Because relationship loss is a perception, the more you can do to pull your teammates closer together, the better.

Zappos invests a lot of care towards scaling the same strong culture, familial atmosphere, and tight-knit vibe it had when it was considerably smaller. It even devised a “face game,” in which an employee’s face and bio appear when you connect into the computer system, and you must guess the person’s name. Karma, a smaller firm, observes the Cheers rule by eating daily family-style lunches together.

3. Use transparency to make collaborating simpler.

“An information system that gives teams with the data and forecasts members’ need to proactively manage their job,” according to Hackman, is one critical support structure identified with effective teams. As organizations get larger, each increase in relational linkages provides the chance to additional miscommunication and misinformation.

Self-service transparency via systems, procedures, and tools aids in the distribution of knowledge and power, allowing individuals to align and move forward as a team.